On a sunny June morning in Paris, Guillaume and I set out for a bike ride from our apartments in the Ninth Arrondissement. He glided ahead on a sleek, charcoal bike that looked expensive and Scandinavian. I lumbered behind on a bulky, green city bike. We pedaled past the day care where we once dropped off our Franco-American infant and headed toward the Seine.
On two wheels, Guillaume moved like a shark through water — effortless. He used to be a bike messenger. We stopped at the red light near the Chipotle where I cried over a plastic basket of soft tacos the night Guillaume told me he was filing for divorce.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Don’t get me killed.”
He laughed. “Promise.”
We were en route to the police station to request legal authorization for our 5-year-old daughter to travel outside France. She’s not allowed to fly internationally without this bureaucratic pre-approval. At the roughest patch in our divorce, I had accused him of reckless partying. He’d said I was a kidnapping threat. In contentious splits, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.
When we were still a family, I rarely biked in Paris, except for the occasional Sunday outing. It seemed too risky, and I seldom ventured beyond my Right Bank neighborhood anyway. But after the divorce and the French court’s 50/50 custody ruling, I found myself in a foreign land of long, childless hours. As my Paris life expanded, biking became a practical way to explore the city, and in doing so I also rediscovered a youthful sense of joy — whizzing by traffic, phone out of reach.
The light changed and we shoved off, past the brasserie where we once sat outside and ordered oysters on ice, before we moved here, when we were still living in Brooklyn and just visiting. Back then, every red awning, every Gatti chair, and every bow-tied waiter seduced me: “This could be your home.”
I thought about those days, when the future seemed awash with possibilities, as we cruised past the hidden stairwell to the hushed Palais Royal.
My eyes drifted between the streets, vigilant for potholes, and the curve of Guillaume’s shoulder blades under a heather gray T-shirt. I didn’t think about the purpose of our ride. Instead, my mind drifted to the bike he leaned over on the Brooklyn subway platform the night we first met.
“Can you tell me which way goes to Manhattan?” he asked. His bike had a flat tire.
I pointed to the westbound track.
When the train rattled into the station, I looked back at him. His eyes had never left. I winked and nodded toward our train. My skin tingled as he rolled his bike into the subway car behind me.
We would keep that flat tire as a memento.
I thought about another memory from a little later on the same platform. I blushed and began to turn away from him. He took my face in his hands and kissed my cheeks gently. He made me believe that it wasn’t bad to feel the world so hard.
We pedaled past the Louvre, my clunky cruiser bouncing over the cobblestones. I thought about the time we rode over the Manhattan Bridge on a motor scooter — we weren’t even wearing helmets! The sky was pitch black as Guillaume told me about his family — how his mother was from Majorca and how close he was with his sister.
I latched my arms around his waist, nose nuzzling his back, and pictured meeting these people. I didn’t consider how he would eventually fracture the family we formed together.
In the police station waiting room there was a play area with colorful stacks of books and two vending machines, one for coffee and one for fresh-pressed orange juice. We took a seat on a wooden bench.
Since our separation 18 months earlier, these trips to the police station were the only times we were alone together. The war was over, replaced by small talk. We chatted about work — my literary ambitions; his desk-job frustrations (he had previously owned a renovation business).
“Are you dating anyone?” I asked, breath tight.
“No,” he said. “You?”
“I was seeing one guy but it’s not serious,” I said. “He’s kind of depressed after a rough breakup.”
“You don’t want that,” he said.
Intended or not, his seeming spirit of protectiveness made my heart flutter.
He talked about the newly divorced mother who took him by the elbow at the end-of-year school party. My stomach lurched. I told him about the single father who often lingered by the door as I dropped off our daughter.
“Please don’t date any moms at school,” I said.
“Please don’t date any of the dads,” he said.
“Deal.”
The receptionist called Guillaume’s surname, which stung every time I remembered it was no longer mine.
We emerged from the police station with our signed authorizations in hand and drifted back into the muted, late-morning light. Whenever we parted, I felt compelled to say something significant — to test the waters of his feelings, or maybe just to buy some time.
“Want to get a coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, grateful for the extra half-hour together.
We sat shoulder to shoulder on woven chairs and looked out on the humming Sixth Arrondissement. As he puffed an e-cigarette, we talked about our daughter, swapping funny anecdotes from our single-parent moments with her. For all we did wrong, she would always be our greatest mutual accomplishment. Every so often, I floated outside of my body and looked down — this is what it’s like to be divorced and co-parenting.
I didn’t think about the declined calls at 6 a.m. when I was desperate to know why he hadn’t come home. I didn’t think about the screaming matches when he finally slinked into the apartment after sunrise. Instead, I thought about how his love once felt inevitable and endless. I thought about how good I had it — how generous he could be — and how insecurities had piled up to ruin it. These days, I’m a harsh judge only when it comes to myself.
“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if we could be who we are now, back when we were together,” I said. “Me, independent and happy. You, stable with a solid routine. I wonder if it could work.”
He barely considered my words. “We weren’t good together.”
Some people are extraordinary compartmentalizers. I am not. I could see the good we threw away with the bad, even if I misrepresented the proportions. But I let him have it. I had long let go of the need to be right.
As he dialed a code into his bike lock, another chamber of his intimacy to which I no longer had the password, I idled nearby, my heart returning to its familiar race. The words were rising in my throat. I could no longer hold them in.
“I just want to be able to see you and not love every part of you,” I said.
He could have said anything. But he didn’t.
So I gazed downward. “Even your big fat feet. I want to not love your fat feet.”
As more tears slid from my eyes, we both laughed. The intimacy of our inside jokes could never be erased.
“I don’t think I’ll ever feel the same way about someone,” I said.
He stabilized the bike between us. “You will someday,” he said. “You will. Just give it time.”
I fell in love with him one last time — for his kindness, his sensitivity. His conviction that I was lovable, even if not by him anymore.
Later that summer, I dragged two giant suitcases up my street. Just off the red eye from New York followed by a long taxi ride, I gleamed with sweat under the August sun.
Guillaume had met me at the bottom of the hill, and I passed him the baton, our daughter. Our vacation was over and theirs was beginning. That evening, they would catch a flight to Majorca.
When I finally arrived at my door, I was thinking about the willful blindness of travel, something I could freely do with my daughter since Guillaume and I had taken that trip to the police station. We must forget the aches of travel — the discomfort of the middle seat and the tedious crawl at border control; the missed trains and the bad meals; the slog from the airport.
You un-remember those things and elevate the happy memories because if you didn’t, you would never travel again. It can be the same with love — choosing to see your failed relationships through rose-colored glasses, diminishing the heartbreak and agony because the will to love is stronger.
As I rolled my suitcases into the cool interior of my building, feeling exhausted, aimless and free, I thought: Of course I’ll travel again. Of course I’ll love again. The pain is a small price for the ride.
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